Recent reviews by Zuggy

Minecraft but good

Introduction:
Starbound has a lot of potentials and is a good game by itself, the terraria comparison is inevitable but the games are not all that similar (even the art style). The game gets updated often and has quite a bit of replayability.

This game does a lot of things well, the gameplay is very satisfying. The combat soothes the style of the game, having abilities tied to your weapons is a very cool way to mix up the combat, you have your usual shotgun with a flashlight, you have your cloud wand or you can have your poison-thrower spear of doom, cool.
The combat system has problems that are not exclusive to it, but part of a bigger problem, the looting system, the loot system has some surprises, you have your "epic" weapons that are unique and equal, and you have your random weapons, that range from very good to garbage, this makes the game progression weird, being slow at the beginning (when you don't have the means of looting planets fast) and very fast at others (when you have speed boosts/jump boosts/etc.) which is the biggest problem the game has, the bosses can be hard or can be very easy depending on the random loot you got. To tie to these progression problems, the game also has systems that are not needed AT ALL to progress, you can build a base but its kind of useless because the best place to keep your stuff is always your ship, you can do very cool mech fights in space, but its kind of useless because you can progress easily without ever touching your mech, fishing, archeology, etc., some of these features are really cool (like the mechs) and are never better than your weapons (if you grind a lot they might be useful).

Your inventory system is another can of worms, you have tons of spaces, but not nearly enough for some elements of the game (blocks, farming, etc.), it would be fun to see some method to expand your inventory.

The exploration feature is Starbound's best feature, it's where the game shines, you have your ship and your fuel, and you can travel ALL OVER THE PLACE, you have infinite possibilities to get blocks, find dungeons, mine, die in the planet core. Unfortunately, it is also affected by the progression system, because the exploration is very much dependent on it, you have different tiers of systems, that have different tiers of loot, most of the times you can jump on a planet and just mine some of the next tier ore and proceed to do the same until you have the best gear.

The missions are on the top of the list, they progress the story and give you your boss fights, the missions are very different from each other, having multiple themes and loot, the bosses also have some interesting mechanics, and (if you are not overpowered) they can be quite challenging, except if you're playing in multiplayer, the bosses don't feel any harder and multiplayer makes the game 10x easier, which really doesn't help it, since these games are better played (in my opinion) with friends.

Conclusion:
This game suffers from its best elements, the progression is very flawed, and the game feels easy at times due to this, I believe it can be fixed but I have no ideas on how to. Overall I think that the game is quite good, though, when inspecting its core, we can find some flaws that can make the game very unbalanced/unfun.
All the critics and "negative" remarks might make you think its a bad game, but I just enjoyed this game a lot and it's a shame that it could be a lot better.